Tag Archives: Futurology ~ Einstein Ring and more

Sweden has installed the first electric road – it charges vehicles as they drive across it.

Hubble Space Telescope discovered a light-bending Einstein Ring in space —The perfect circle surrounding a galaxy cluster in a new Hubble Space Telescope image is a visual indicator of the huge masses bending time and space in that region. The galaxy cluster, called SDSS J0146-0929, features hundreds of individual galaxies all bound together by gravity.
There’s so much mass in this region that the cluster is distorting light from objects behind it. This phenomenon is called an Einstein Ring because Albert Einstein suggested that a massive object would warp space and time back in the early 1900s.~ This process is known today as a gravitational lens. Wow, what a clever bloke Einstein was!

Tiny neutron star spews out X-rays — The Hubble keeps on discovering. 1E 0102.2-7219 has the remnants of a supernova in one our Milky Way’s closest neighbours, the Small Magellanic Cloud dwarf galaxy. This supernova remnant is especially well-studied, but that hasn’t stopped astronomers from continuing to find new surprises, such as the neutron star at its centre.~ A neutron star can pack the mass of our Sun and more into a ball less than 32km across. Heavy, right?

Europe’s gas-sniffing spacecraft to detect Martian gases — In about two weeks, the European Space Agency and Roscosmos orbiter will begin to scan the Martian atmosphere in search of trace gases, including those potentially linked to life.~ Mars’ atmosphere is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s. So it’s got to be one amazing sniffer.

One-degree rise in temperature causes ripple effect in world’s largest High Arctic lake — A 1 C increase in temperature has set off a chain of events disrupting the entire ecology of the world’s largest High Arctic lake. The amount of glacial meltwater going into the lake has dramatically increased. The changes resulted in algal blooms and detrimental changes to the Arctic char fish population, and point to a near certain future of summer ice-free conditions. The findings document an unprecedented shift from the previous three centuries.~ A gimp I know once told me that ‘global warming was a left wing conspiracy’. I asked him what the left wing could possibly gain from such a conspiracy. He cut me off.

Then there are these just-discovered ‘super-salty’ arctic lakes — Anja Rutishauser, a PhD student at the University of Alberta, accidentally discovered two sub-glacial super-salty lakes while conducting a geological survey of the area. She was able to confirm the presence of a hypersaline subglacial lake complex.
The lakes measure about five and eight square kilometres (between two and three square miles) in size, but aren’t connected to any known sources of meltwater. Excitingly, these super-salty lakes, with their cold, liquid water, are potential hosts for microbial life – and reasonably good approximations of what the conditions might be like on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.~ But are they full of pre-salted fish?

World’s first electrified road for charging vehicles opens in Sweden — A 2 kilometre (1.2-mile) stretch of road with electric rails has been installed in Stockholm, Sweden. This allows electric vehicles to charge up their batteries as they drive across it. The technology behind the electrification of the road linking Stockholm Arlanda airport to a logistics site outside the capital city aims to solve the thorny problems of keeping electric vehicles charged, and the manufacture of their batteries affordable.~ At a cost of €1m per kilometre, the cost of electrification is said to be 50 times lower than that required to construct an urban tram line!

3D-Printed public housing unveiled in France — Researchers have unveiled what they billed as the world’s first 3D-printed house to serve as a home in the French city of Nantes, with the first tenants due to move in by June. From a report:
Academics at the University of Nantes who led the project said it was the first house built in situ for human habitation using a robot 3D-printer. The BatiPrint3D robot uses a special polymer material that should keep the building insulated effectively for a century. It took BatiPrint3D around 18 days to complete its part of the work on the house, creating hollow walls that were subsequently filled with concrete.~ The 95-square-metre (1000 square feet), five-room house will be allocated to a local family qualified for social housing.

Sweden had a Pompeii and an onion — On the Swedish island of Öland, at a ring fort called Sandby Borg, archaeologists have uncovered a peculiar onion, project leader Helena Victor found a preserved bulb and sent it to archaeobotanist Jens Heimdahl at The Swedish History Museum, who discovered the ‘big nut’ was in fact a 1500-year-old onion. It’s the oldest one ever found in Scandinavia.
Sandby Borg was the site of a mysterious fifth-century massacre. In 2013, Sweden’s Kalmar County Museum and Lund University researchers found the slaughtered remains of its inhabitants.~ Maybe they had terrible breath …

88,000-year-old middle finger found in Saudi Arabia could rewrite human history — A lone, bony middle finger is probably the oldest directly dated fossil of our species to ever be found outside of Africa and the region that comprises Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. But the new discovery is not without its critics, who say older evidence of human habitation outside of this region exists elsewhere, and that the finger might not even be human.~ I’m not convinced either. After all, it’s hard to write anything with just one finger.

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